Olmsted Falls City Council will wait on sewer vote

JOSEPH CLARK/SPECIAL TO SUN NEWSJoseph Burnell, a resident of River Road in Olmsted Falls, asks City Council for more research on the impact of sewer construction on homes in the area.

OLMSTED FALLS City Council voted to table a resolution that would have begun the next stage in the final segment of the city’s sewer renovation project.

At a Sept. 11 meeting, council and Mayor Robert Blomquist agreed to hold on passing the legislation until further research could be conducted on residents’ concerns about the impact of construction on their homes.

Resolution 95-2012 would declare the necessity of improving the sewer systems in a Northwestern area of town between Cranage Road and Water Street. As a “resolution of necessity,” it requires approval from six council members. The measure was expected to be read for the third and final time and voted on at the council’s Sept. 11 meeting.

However, some affected citizens, especially several River Road residents, repeatedly broadcast concerns about the effects of construction on their older, often historically registered homes. Some requested the possibility to opt out of the project. Council and the mayor agreed to conduct further research on the impact of construction, especially large machine vibrations, on older homes.

“A lot of people are afraid of what will happen to their homes because of seismic vibrations translating to foundations. We’re trying to find out facts and get them to council,” Blomquist said.

Council members said that going into the meeting they did not expect the legislation to be delayed, but when a suggestion to table it was made, members unanimously agreed. Council now must wait until at least Sept. 25 to unfreeze the bill and vote on it, after final deliberations in a work session immediately preceding the council meeting.

The mayor said he expected all relevant information to be collected in the coming weeks, and that a vote will take place later than Sept. 25.

“I don’t see the value of delaying it beyond that,” Blomquist said.

Marilyn Quay Sparks, chairwoman of the Architectural Board of Review and a River Road resident, said that a civil engineer associated with the Cleveland Restoration Society will evaluate the effect construction will have on older houses.

Half of the $5 million sewer project is paid by grants from Cuyahoga County, and the other $2.5 million will be paid by assessments on affected individuals’ properties. The grants require that the project begins construction in 2013; the city had planned to take bids this winter, and begin construction early next year. It is unclear as to whether the decision to delay the vote on the legislation will affect the starting date for construction.

Before the meeting, Kitty Fenderbosch, council president pro tempore, argued that River Road’s opting out of the project could be prohibitively expensive. Fenderbosch cited estimates that with Cuyahoga’s grants, the total assessment costs to River residents will be about $400,000, or an average of $10,000 per home. She said that even though the sanitation standards the new sewers are being installed to meet currently are not mandatory, she expected that they would be in the foreseeable future. This means that all Falls residents eventually will have to upgrade their sanitation systems. Without the benefit of Cuyahoga’s grants, residents would have to pick up the whole cost of sewer improvement, and individual houses would have to pay between $20,000 or $30,000 in assessments.

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